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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#751

Post by joeguilmette »

joeguilmette wrote: post #49

I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…

And here we go: https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/ubers-self-driving-cars-st...

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#752

Post by jpindar »

kLeeIsDead wrote: post #395
jrowley wrote: post #260

How long until someone puts a personal gym inside a self driving SUV, so you can workout during your commute? I can imagine people running on a treadmill inside a car while it is stuck in traffic. Or at least sitting on a trainer.

Or just a bed.

Given that these cars are supposedly going to strand us on the side of the road (or in our workplace parking lot) on many snowy winter nights, they had better have beds.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#753

Post by greedo »

laurentoget wrote: post #708
greedo wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a frequent argument I keep seeing about the cost of insurance rising as autonomous vehicles are introduced. There's no reason they'll rise past what they're currently charging; insurance takes into account current risk. In the future, the risk if anything should decrease.

The risk may decrease but liability may increase, as this is a risk you are taking deliberately if you decide to drive your car instead of getting a safe self driving car like everybody else.

Insurance doesn't work that way. Liability isn't an ephemeral concept, it's the chance of a claim X the amount of a claim, pooled in a group of buyers with differing risks. The relative cost of insurance compared to an autonomous vehicle should increase, but not the dollar amount.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#754

Post by EdHominem »

londons_explore wrote: post #467
walrus1066 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an option, but London has loads of signal black holes, or the speed is just not good enough. Infinitely worse in the country, if we want autonomous lorries. I think we'd need a huge infrastructure upgrade to make life easier for autonomous cars. It'd have to be >100 Mb/s mobile data, with extremely good coverage (for the recovery mechanism you mention). Think GPS would need to be replaced too, the signal is wa…

No need for high speed - all these issues can be resolved by inching forward or back to get the car back onto the open road. (although obviously high speed is a bonus) Connectivity you see is from a single mobile phone. A car could have a better antenna, service from all the mobile networks rather than just one, wifi fallback and a backup satellite uplink. If all those fail, you dispatch an engineer to find the car w…

It might even be the sort of thing where you tap the video of the street ahead to tag the bag as passable and the car then slowly drives through it. No remote guidance per-se.

Considering these are car companies doing this, true remote control is not a good idea. The industry response to the car hacks was pathetic. Only Tesla reacted properly. (And probably Google...)

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#755

Post by jedberg »

stannol wrote: post #732
jedberg wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait five years. It'll almost certainly happen. The technology is solvable and lots of very big companies are spending billions to make it happen.

For some very limited use cases five years may be realistic. For a car that can do everything and go everywhere a human driver can it's more like 50 years.

What limited use case though? Driving around a populated city? They can already do that. And that covers a whole lot of use cases.

There are already autonomous Ubers taking people around Philadelphia and now San Francisco.

What limits do you think will exist?

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#756

Post by jpindar »

ainiriand wrote: post #733
joeguilmette wrote: post #49

I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…

I have the feeling that Toyota actually is going to make it for everyone. They are incredible car makers.

And incredibly horrible software makers.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#757

Post by EdHominem »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #744
EdHominem wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't efficient for Toyota to fully stock every city in the world for peak demand, and yet that's what they'd have to do to compete with the surging multi-manufacturer fleet of Uber.

They don't need to stock for peak demand. They don't need a monopoly (nor will they be permitted to get one). To succeed worldwide, they simply need to be as good as Uber, but cheaper. And if the capital cost of the car becomes half of the cost base of taxis, a 10% saving matters.

To get as big as Uber means they need to be as convenient which means that there's always a car available. Uber handles that by being multi-brand, and by incentivizing their fleet with surge pricing.

Toyota would have to prepare for worst-case load and let those cars sit idle to keep them available. And they'd have to do that in almost every city in the world or their app would just be another local annoyance.

Also, if you order a Toyota and a Ford shows up you're going to laugh and tweet it.

On the other hand, it does give them a stable production target which would level out manufacturing spikes...

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#758

Post by kbenson »

EdHominem wrote: post #757
MagnumOpus wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to stock for peak demand. They don't need a monopoly (nor will they be permitted to get one). To succeed worldwide, they simply need to be as good as Uber, but cheaper. And if the capital cost of the car becomes half of the cost base of taxis, a 10% saving matters.

To get as big as Uber means they need to be as convenient which means that there's always a car available. Uber handles that by being multi-brand, and by incentivizing their fleet with surge pricing. Toyota would have to prepare for worst-case load and let those cars sit idle to keep them available. And they'd have to do that in almost every city in the world or their app would just be another local annoyance. Also,…

> On the other hand, it does give them a stable production target which would level out manufacturing spikes...

That's the underlying assumption I was working with. If they've invested heavily in production yet they see a downturn in individual ownership, it's a way to capitalize on that resource (factories) to stabilize production until some factories reach end-of-life and have theoretically paid for themselves. Factories which require large capital expenditure are not something you want to see sitting idle. Every year is another year where the tooling is becoming more obsolete.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#759

Post by Camillo »

rajathagasthya wrote: post #185
Camillo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using Uber because it completely stopped working once I set location access to "only while in use".

AFAIK, Uber doesn't even allow to set location access to "while in use". It's either "always" or "never".

That may have changed with a recent update. I'm pretty sure I set it to "only when in use", but the app updated soon after. Now I went back to check, and it got set to "never".

Why does Apple even allow apps to remove the "only when in use" option?

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#760

Post by Florin_Andrei »

BigJono wrote: post #727
ams6110 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America was founded on the notion that the state is a bad actor.

And it will fall on that notion too if it fails to adapt to a changing economy.

> > America was founded on the notion that the state is a bad actor.

> And it will fall on that notion too if it fails to adapt to a changing economy.

I agree with both statements.

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